Yep, that’s the question that I was asked when the young cashier at Bulk Barn rang up my jug o’ molasses and small mountain of brown sugar. I shrugged nonchalantly and said that these ingredients were the only way I know to make rum. He looked at me like I had gone mental and we parted ways.
You can take that introduction to mean that yes, the rum cookoff is officially complete. I modified the recipe to park the OG at 1.07 (17 brix). The conversion claims that it might spit out about 9.5 percent alcohol. We’ll see where it lands. The wash in the fermenter is high between 12 and 13 gallons. If we do, in fact, get 9.5% yield, we’ll have about a gallon of booze to play with. Sounds exciting, right?
A couple of other quick notes about this run:
- I never brought the wash to boil. I figured hey, why invest the time in watching it cool. All I needed to do was dissolve sugar and molasses into it. It peaked at about 140 Fahrenheit. We worked to cool it quickly by tossing in ziplocs full of ice.
- The new equipment (thus far) has performed admirably. I will be doing a more thorough review coming up. I even took pictures, I know…you’re shocked
- I had to mix yeast since I didn’t have sufficient quantity of any one kind. I used high spirits 48 turbo (6.6 gallons) and high spirits whiskey yeast. We’ll see how it goes.
So now we wait, watch and ferment. The distillation will be a lot of fun this time both because there should be SO MUCH of it, and because I’ve got additional help thanks to family and the Man of Steele.
The Distiller's Journal 